The
eighth century BC is normally seen as a watershed in world history.
In the Late Bronze Age (c. 1600-1200 BC) palace-based civilizations
had spread as far west as Greece, and had extensive contacts with
eastern Sicily, southern Italy, and Sardinia. After 1200 these contacts
declined. Regular Phoenician voyages to the west only resumed around
950-900. Then, after 800, they increased enormously in scale, and
Phoenicians and Greeks began settling around the coasts of the west
Mediterranean. By 700 the level of east-west interaction far eclipsed
anything seen in the Bronze Age. Over the next four centuries many
societies around the Mediterraneans western shores took on Greek
and Phoenician scripts, artistic styles, mythological systems, urban
forms, technology, military methods, and economic networks. This process
is commonly called Hellenization (although Phoenicianization
might sometimes be a better word), and may have laid the socioeconomic
foundations that made possible the Roman political unification of
the Mediterranean basin, the spread of Christianity through it, and
its eventual bifurcation into the Islamic and Christian Middle Ages.
In this grand narrative, the Hellenization that began in the eighth
century BC was an epochal turning point.

In
the 1990s, driven perhaps by the growing interconnectedness of our
own world and the traumatic changes wrought by this globalization,
historians have been thinking more and more about this grand narrative,
and challenging many of its key theses. Our research at Monte Polizzo
has grown out of this new movement. We ask a simple question, that
we believe cuts to the heart of the matter: what was Hellenization?

Sicily
as a test case

There
are two obvious ways to approach this question. First, we could look
at the literature and archaeology of Greek and Phoenician settlements
in the west, examining the process from the perspective of the Hellenizers
(and/or Phoenicianizers); or second, we could look at the archaeology
(since very little written evidence survives) of the indigenous communities
that came into contact with the settlers. In the twentieth century
most research followed the first path, often beginning from very simple
models of the transmission of culture from higher, more civilized
peoples, to lower, backward ones. At this point in the history of
research, the second path clearly offers the highest payoff, and only
by focusing on indigenous communities can we hope to produce a broader
synthesis of the process of Hellenization. This is why we are excavating
at Monte Polizzo.

Monte
Polizzo is an ideal place to try to understand Hellenization. Sicily
is often described by terms such as the crossroads of the Mediterranean,
the bridge linking Europe and Africa, or the stepping-stone between
east to west. More than anywhere else, Sicily was where the great
demographic, economic, and cultural forces of the archaic Mediterranean
met. In the sixth century BC, both Phoenicians and Greeks had settled
around the shores of western Sicily, where they rubbed shoulders with
indigenous peoples whom the Greeks called Elymians and Sicans. In
no other part of the Mediterranean did such a variety of cultures
share such a small space, and here the first period of Hellenization
played itself out with particular clarityand brutality.

Different
types of answer

Our
question about Hellenization calls for two distinct kinds of answers.
The first kind operates at a relatively high level of abstraction.
Monte Polizzo is an ideal test case to see how well archaeologists
can understand the relationships between human agency and grand processes.
Men make their own history, but not in ways of their own choosing.
At Monte Polizzo we can observe how a small community (probably no
more than 2000 people) responded to demographic processes that were
beyond its control, and how local decision-making channeled these
vast impersonal forces toward particular outcomes. Hellenization was
a huge process worked out by millions of people across several centuries.
When we look in detail at small places, as archaeologists inevitably
do, we find huge differences between them; yet when we stand back
and confront a mass of data from a large area, as archaeologists also
inevitably do, we find broadly shared patterns at a higher level of
abstraction. We want to understand better how large-scale long-term
history is constituted out of very intimate events on a human timescale.

The
second kind of answer is much more particular. Since the sixteenth
century, Sicilian antiquarians have argued that the fusion of Greek,
Phoenician, and indigenous societies produced a unique culture. In
one version of this story, Sicilian culture since the eighth century
BC has been more open to new ideas and influences than any other.
It reached its zenith in the 1220s AD, when Frederick II, the stupor
mundi, presided over the worlds most glittering court at
Palermo. In another version, expressed most powerfully in Lampedusas
novel The Leopard, the Phoenicians and Greeks pushed Sicily
onto a very different trajectory:

We
are old, Chevalley, very old. For over twenty-five centuries weve
been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations,
all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call
our won. Were as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen
of England; and yet for two thousand five hundred years weve
been a colony

This
violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension
in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet
incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us
like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force
from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and
always misunderstood. Their only expressions were works of art we
couldnt understand and taxes which we understood only too well
and which they spent elsewhere. All these things have formed our character,
which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as
by a terrifying insularity of mind.

Since
1860, both these versions of the story have been used to justify
treating Sicily differently from northern Italy. Hellenization is
a crucial element in Sicilian self-understandings. Agrigento, Selinunte,
and Segesta function as shrines to local identity, and the sixth

century
BC is the twilight of Sicilian freedom.

Measuring
Hellenization

We
are far from being the first archaeologists to raise these questions.
Since the 1980s Sicilian archaeologists have carried out major excavations
and surveys in inland western Sicily, often taking Hellenization
as the central issue. They have developed three main indices for
studying the process: pottery style, housing, and religious ritual.
The indices are well chosen, and we too focus on them, but also
add a fourth index, diet.

Stanfords
excavations concentrate on the highest point of the town, conventionally
called the acropolis. We made this decision because Sicilian archaeologists
who have excavated the upper parts of other sixth-century sites
have found distinctive deposits and buildings that they have interpreted
as sanctuaries. They have often seen significant borrowings from
Greek culture in these sanctuaries, and have argued that this demonstrates
extensive Hellenization in the sixth century.

We
want to define better what the sacred meant in sixth-century
BC western Sicily, and the extent to which this concept was expressed
spatially and through material culture. Some archaeologists have
proceeded by defining deposits as religious on the basis of how
much they look like Greek sanctuaries, and then concluding that
religion was heavily Hellenized. We think that we might get better
results by comparing the deposits at the highest point of Monte
Polizzo (acropolis zone A) with those from other parts of the site,
to determine just what was different about the activities on the
highest point of the site and (a) whether sacredness is the best
explanation of these differences, (b) if so, what sacredness was,
and (c) how sacred space was bounded. Only then will we be in a
position to start discussing the Hellenization of religion.

To
understand the boundaries of the sacred in western Sicily, we are
excavating zones B-D, asking whether there are discontinuities in
activity that might mark transitions between sacred and non-sacred
space, or whether changes were gradual. We are also interested in
the social dimensions of sacredness. The deposits in zones C and
D seem to be conventional domestic remains, which can be compared
with those at House I and Portella SantAnna to see whether
proximity to zone A correlates to any other differences in activities
and deposits.

Since
2000, we have been developing excavation methods that, we hope,
will lead to answers to these questions [METHODS
PAGE]. And although the project is still at an early
stage, we have begun to accumulate results, which in turn are leading
to a whole new set of questions [RESULTS
AND NEW QUESTIONS PAGE].

Bibliography

Mediterranean
connections

Peregrine
Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study in Mediterranean
History (Oxford 2000)


Megara Hyblaia and Selinous: The Development of Two Greek City-States
in Archaic Sicily (Oxford 2002)

Sicilian
narratives

Moses
Finley and Dennis Mack Smith, A History of Sicily (2 vols.,
London 1968)

Giovanni
Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (New York 1961)

Giovanna
Ceserani, The charm of the Siren: the place of classical Sicily
in historiography, in Christopher Smith and Jonathan Serrati,
eds., Ancient Sicily from Aeneas to Cicero (Edinburgh 2000)
174-193